I’ve been gone for a few days; I’m not even going to pretend I haven’t this time. This weekend was my first, and possibly only, foray into volunteering at a convention: I was in charge of children’s programming at Conjecture in San Diego. It was, shall we say, an experience. They hadn’t warned me that the wireless was going to be down, though, and I was kept busy enough that there really wasn’t enough time to put posts together anyway—and since I’ve got a midterm that I really should be prioritizing, I’m not going to try to make up the missing posts like I usually do.

On the plus side, I am in the process of indirectly giving a plush mouse to one of my favorite authors (it makes sense in context, I promise), I’ve learned all sorts of interesting things from the panels, there is a board game that is most definitely on my To Buy list, and of the few panels I managed to attend, most were amazing and left me with all sorts of new ideas. There will probably be commentary later, particularly about the panel on Fantasy and SF of Manners and the use of culture as a character.

I think the best parts, though, were the little things that stayed in mind. I remember the con as a blur from listening to a fellow attendee consider starting a conlangs-for-hire business to filkers talking about that time in the 80s when they were goofing off on the audience-favorite songs because they were sick of singing them to talking gender issues with an outspoken nine-year-old to last-minute preparation for oncoming children to punching out Cthulhu with my mother, my boyfriend and my favorite GM to realizing that one of my current favorite authors cat-sits for one of my old favorite authors (does everyone know everyone in this industry?), bookended by panels on world-building that both included a steampunk author and the social media manager of Reading Rainbow, and all with at least one plushie Aeslin mouse somewhere on my person.

I’ll be back to normal posting schedule Monday night. Right now, I just need to get my feet back under me.